There will be about 75 hours of work to be done before new client is ready for stress testing so after months we are at the final stages.Once testing is complete and things run well in beta and dangers of forking are minimised we should be good for release into the wild.

Came across another "ERROR: CDataStream::read() : end of data" error when loading the wallet but we can safely ignore this one. Bitcoin changed the format of keys in the wallet from [pubkey] => [privkey] to [pubkey] => [privkey][hash(pubkey,privkey)] in a backwards compatible way. It tries to read the missing hash on old wallets which fails and throws the above error.
After a few updates to the client it says it is staking, if it actually generates a block is another matter and if that block is accepted by the rest of the network another matter still, but I can see in the logs that it is trying to mine a PoS block.